TortoiseSVN is one of the best and well-known GUI for SVN. It has also given birth to parallel projects for all the other VCS (TortoiseHG, TortoiseGit…). It’s only fair a book is dedicated to it.
Content and opinions
The objective of the book is not only to guide you through TortoiseSVN when you know about SVN, it’s about using efficiently a VCS when you know nothing about it. In consequence, the book can be considered as a SVN tutorial.
The book starts with the installation of TortoiseSVN, and also a SVN server. Then, the basic actions for version control are described in the context of the GUI (checkout, commit). The next step moves towards team work with patches and conflict management. These tools are mandatory for branching and merging. Once these topics are tackled with, basic version control can be achieved.
The book goes on with aspects that are not mandatory but that ease development: log analysis and blame (who wrote what and when in a file), moving checkouts, usage of SubWCRev, and what is more interesting, bug tracking integration and communication over SSL.
Each topic has a lot of images, explanation, steps for action, and a small sum up. The last point may not be useful for everyone, but it tells you where you stand before moving forward.
Conclusion
SVN has a lot of dedicated books, but they are geared toward commandline. Here, we have the first book for complete GUI integration, and if you don’t know how to use a version control system, this book is an excellent way of getting into business.